Yesterday morning while I was headed
across the Howard Street in San Francisco, on my way to the Media
queue lined up for Steve Jobs' much-hyped keynote address at
Macworld, the first guy I ran into was
Chris DiBona, wearing
his
Slashdot
badge. Joining him were several other semi-familiar looking guys,
so for a moment I actually thought I was at a LinuxWorld Expo. But
this was the first day of Macworld Expo--same world, same venue
(Moscone Center), different show.

Given the changes in both markets, however, a little
confusion is understandable. The constituencies have begun to
overlap. The foundation under Apple's OS X is BSD. Politics and
rivalries aside, this attracts a lot of Linux weenies, not to
mention UNIX heavies of varied provenance, including BSD guru
Jordan Hubbard,
who now
works
for Apple on the
Darwin
Project.

I wasn't inside more than a minute before a friend asked me
if I had heard about
Moxi, the Palo
Alto company founded by Steve Perlman, a veteran of Apple and
WebTV. Moxi had just made news by going public with a sexy new
media center
that promised to blow lots of current consumer electronics hardware
out of the water. Moxi poses a variety of threats to TiVo, Sony and
other entertaining companies. But none of those topics were the
subjects at hand. Instead my friend said this: "Did you hear it
runs on Linux?"

In past years at Macworld my Linux
Journal shirt would have seemed more out of place than a
leisure suit. But this year it fits right in. There were people in
line wearing Sun and SGI schwag too. One guy told me he thought OS
X was "subversive" because it "seeds" millions of otherwise
unsuspecting households with open-source UNIX. "I can go to my
Mom's, fire up her iMac, open a shell, ssh to my own server and get
some real work done", one guy said to me. Ahead in line a kid
parked an iBook on a recycling bin, turning it this way and that,
looking for an 802.11b signal. On one corner of the laptop's lid
was a little blue "Linux Inside" sticker.

Of course there was plenty of buzz about what Steve would
announce at the show. This is beyond predictable, since Steve's
keynote speech is high mass on the holiest day in the Macintosh
liturgical calendar. The difference this year was an unusually high
level of hype. "Prepare to be blown away", the Apple web site
teased. But thanks to a screw-up by Time Canada, the upcoming
Time magazine
cover
story about Apple's radically odd new iMac was already all
over the Web, so speculation ran to lesser matters. What else would
he talk about?

The answer was: not much.

Last year Steve had a lot to say about the UNIX roots of OS
X, about open source and about the debt of influence Apple owed to
thousands of customers and outside hackers who contributed code to
the kernel. I looked forward to a progress report, but this year he
just talked about numbers. There are 2,500 new applications for OS
X, for example. Later I heard that a lot of these were ported UNIX
apps, which was the kind of thing I wanted to know more
about.

Then he went on to review the company's "digital hub"
strategy (your PC as a device driver for all kinds of consumer
electronics peripherals) and introduced a few new SKUs in the
existing iBook line. Somewhere in there he introduced Apple's
attractive new
iPhoto software,
which makes organizing, printing and sharing photographs extremely
simple and easy (as well as free-as-in-beer).

But the Big Deal was the new
iMac. "This is the
best thing we've ever done", Steve said, as if there was nothing
more to say. It was beautiful, with a form factor that had more in
common with a Luxo lamp or a makeup mirror than with anything you
might call a computer. Apple engineers had worked on it for two and
a half years. He showed it tenderly to the audience, as if he just
showed up with his new girlfriend. It would be bad form to upstage
her.

So there wasn't even Steve's usual "one more thing" encore.
That was how he had introduced the company's then-new
Titanium laptop
one year ago.

The entire service was over two hours long (about average),
so wireless-equipped audience members had fun setting up adhoc
network identities while they tried to find a WiFi base station
with access to the Net. (On the right there's a screen shot of my
own view.)

There wasn't any, which is consistent with Apple's highly
managed approach to PR flow.

Anyway, the real interesting stuff happened afterwards,
downstairs on the trade show floor, in a massive private booth
Apple had set up just for The Media. I was eager to see what was up
with OS X, especially around
Darwin, its
BSD-based open-source kernel. Was there a Penguin/Ox synergy going
on? If so, what was that about, and where was it headed?

On the walk to the booth I ran into
Tony Fadell, a guy I've
known for a few years but hadn't seen in awhile. (That's him on the
right, below.) He was wearing an Apple badge. "What do you do for
Apple?" I asked. "I designed the
iPod", he
replied.

Then I ran into Ernest Prabhakar (left, with a copy of
Linux Journal) who leads product marketing for
Darwin. He was very eager to talk about synergies, not just between
two operating systems and the various cultures involved, but
between different development interests and modalities. For
example, he said
AppleScript
Studio has the same relationship to GUI development as
shell to command line. "Think about pipelining, but in three
dimensions." He was way past me, but I dug his enthusiasm.

Then he pointed me toward
Brian
Croll, who used to run Eazel. I had interviewed Brian last
spring, a few weeks before that company went under. Before Eazel,
Brian
had been with Sun for many years. Now he was running
engineering for the Darwin end of OS X. And he was excited about
it--especially about the level of open-source activity that's going
on with Darwin.

What impressed me was the "and" logic going on. These guys
don't see OS X as a Linux competitor. "The more you know about
Linux the better you can understand what's happening at the
foundation of OS X," one guy told me. "OS X is a desktop UNIX that
drives a lot of devices. It likes Linux servers, and it likes Linux
devices. It even likes Linux desktops. Vice versa too. There isn't
a problem here."

One commercial software guy had another interesting thing to
say: "Apple doesn't have absolute control of its developer
community, and it's not trying to take over the world. As a
Microsoft developer, you've got this huge gravitational field to
contend with, plus the fact that they want to lock everybody in.
This creates a much different mood."

There's another difference. Microsoft often talks about its
"right to innovate." Even if we grant that Microsoft does innovate
on some things, its reputation is quite otherwise. Not so with
Apple. When Steve Jobs listed nine Apple "innovations" over the
last year (the slide on the left), it's hard not to grant the
company a high degree of originality, even if one protests the
company's proprietary tendencies.

In an elevator somebody asked me why the Linux
Journal logo on my shirt didn't have a penguin. I turned
the question around and asked why OS X didn't have a mascot. "OS X
needs an animal," I said.

"What would it be?" somebody asked.

"How about an ox?" I suggested.

"Ooo," one guy said. "Apple would never go for that."

"Why should that matter?"

"It's BSD. Why not a red devil?"

"Because it's not BSD. Darwin is only 'based' on BSD."

"Then how about a red devil with a big beard, like Charles
Darwin?"

"Or maddog."

"I think you should go back to the ox."

Tomorrow I'm off to find out more about what's really up with
Darwin. The Apple PR apparatus is mostly geared to showcase the
company's prettiest offerings. Meanwhile, Darwin isn't an offering.
It's more like an activity. For that I'll have to go straight to
the geeks. It isn't hard. Some of them look pretty familiar.

Baloney... It's the same old Apple dedicated to extracting $100 bills from the working class.. They proved a long time ago that they could build excellence in their systems.. But MS always gave more choices for the money. GPL/LINUX takes it many steps further giving user choices.. OSX is a great step of technology, But there's many choices of Unices. The excellence of Macintosh OS's is not a measure of their ability to give value to the community. Unix geeks aren't contributing to Macintosh, they are being conned.

Microsoft IS about choices....Not deliberately, but effectively. They brought a certain level of standards out of chaos in the early 1980s.

I date myself... back in the 1980's the sheer volume of software choice made MS imperatiive... They also caused the market to explode by energizing the "clone" market.. The ibm clones combined with easy to plagiarize software made the MS systems extremely interesting concerning choice.. Today, the choices are much more limited, but they still allow you to use choose hardware. We take such choice for granted, but Macintosh will NEVER allow wholeslale cloning of hardware.....As far as present day software goes, MS platforms STILL offer the largest number of choices...And they offer several variations of OS's. Microsoft is now parroting APPLE's proprietary marketing practices. I.E.- Their new required registration is a move that is worth of Apple.'s proprietary mindset.

If Radio Shack, Atari, or Commodore, APPLE, had grabbed the lead, we would be saddled with proprietary and expensive solutions far beyond what we now pay.. The Intel "clone" caused a hardware to be come a commodity. Hardware costs would never have fallen as quickly without the help of the MS 'standard'.

Free'd softwares such as FreeBSD and Linux do NOT offer the desktop choices that MS platforms offer, but they are very competitive with meaningful network and enterprise apps.. And the expression "for the money" gives an edge to FreeBSD and Linux. But most importantly, there is NO COMPANY OR VENDER pressures trying to controll you... Nobody really cares if you defer upgrading, because it's your problem to recognize the need.. No MS or APPLE trying to coerce or force you into an upgrade corner.....

As far as OS X is concerned, I am not sure, but I presume that they will not make it a free download like FreeBSD or Linux....They will take FreeBSD apps, make proprietary changes and not return them to the public.. While that's cerainly legal under certain copyrights, it definitely a MS sort of thing.. I guess nobody is conned, but it feels like it.. Maybe it's the outrageous prices for Macintosh softwares, periphials and support....Perhaps you never had to replace a battery on an SE, and the dealer changed the motherboard to fix the battery and charged the customer $600.... For a $6 battery? That was the factory suggestion.....

As far as the flexibilty and power of OS X, I doubt that many Unix administrators would find that it will do things that they cannot do with other versions of Unix.

Having always been a NON-Professional, I am empowered with more opinions than fact. But it is a fact that Money and expenditure has ALWAYS colored my choice of OS's and the price of expected upgrades and enhancements have always been a key motivator.

Of course, my interpretation of choice, is colored by the fact that I am retired, and NOBODY makes me use WORD... HI..

As an OS X, IRIX, Linux, and AIX admin and developer, I must say most of your comments have very little basis in fact and really only serve to support MS NOT Apple or the Linux community. Two points you made are of specific interest for their total lack of fact:

"As far as OS X is concerned, I am not sure, but I presume that they will not make it a free download like FreeBSD or Linux...."

They already do. See Darwin on the Apple web site. You can download the install image FOR FREE and complete with source (Darwin is the underlying BSD layer and Mach kernel). With very little work you can install xfree86 and you can even have a GUI. Further, look on sourceforge for gnu-darwin which is a Darwin distro which is completely separate from Apple. Yes, it is the "same" Darwin, but if you buy a gnu-darwin CD not a penny goes to Apple (you can also download the gnu-darwin distro and install it FOR FREE).

"They will take FreeBSD apps, make proprietary changes and not return them to the public.."

And this is TOTAL BS. A prefect example is Apache. Every change that Apple made to Apache for it to run natively on OS X (as it is included with evey OS X install) was made to the main Apache source tree and submitted to Apache. Further, if you write some GPL'd app and happen to make sure it will work on OS X, how is that giving anything directly to Apple for them to change and not return those changes to the public?

Perhaps you should craw out from under the rock you have been under for the past 3-4 years. Things have changed, and Apple has succeeded in doing the one thing that the Linux community has never succeeded in: made an OS that your grandmother could use.

microsoft provides choices, that's an interesting comment - perhaps you should read up on the anti-trust case against them - microsoft is not about choices.

considering that darwin is open source, how exactly is the *nix community being conned? How can being provided a solid - clean - interface to a powerful unix kernel be a bad thing?

OS X is allowing me to completely rid myself of Microsoft Windows - I'm sure there are many people like me that have no choice but to use MS Office products (no Star Office is not a choice for obvious reasons), now i have that flexibility - and all the power of a unix workstation to boot (no pun intended ;).

It's refreshing to see the "and" rather than the "vs" when talking about Linux and the MacOS; operating systems in the single-digit market share category are really only doing Microsoft's work for them by ripping each other apart. As Doc's good article states, the *NIXes and OS X aren't really so different after all - and most importantly, neither are their communities when it comes down to it. But often you have to fight a lot of FUD about one or the other from both sides. Thankfully, not everyone is unwilling to try new things: developer friends on both sides of the fence - a fence that is coming down - see laptops with Linux appearing at Mac dev conferences and OS X iBooks popping up at open source shindigs. The mixing of creative and technical talents from different cultures resulted the Renaissance for the nations of Europe: could this similarly be the dawn of a new Golden Age in platform development? Maybe not as long as Microsoft has much to say about it.By the way, some of these same friends called Linux the "ox" 'way back.

Heya, this is Jason Haas, LinuxPPC's former unnamed source. (remember me? ;-) For those who didn't know (which'd be most everyone) I was a longtime Mac user before setting up camp in Linux Land. I've since retired from the computer industry, but I'm quite happy to see Unix and the Mac coming together. I am writing a letter to Steve Jobs to congratulate him on doing this, as merging Unix and the Mac was something that I was trying to do with LinuxPPC.

We basically did it, too, with Mac-on-Linux, which is GPL Mac emulation software. (not that we wrote it or anything, but it was a major part of LPPC.) MOL is not nearly as smooth or integrated as Mac OS X is, but darn it, it worked. Assuming you could figure out how to set it up. ;->

My love of Unix began in 1993, which is when I first began working with it. Yeah, it was CLI-based, which was the Mac's long-time Eville Enemy. But that didn't really matter to me... it was so flexible, so powerful, so stable. (I hadn't even begun using X Windows yet. ;-)

I wanted to meld the two somehow. When I met Jeff Carr, the fellow I started LPPC Inc. he told me that this fellow in Australia had ported Linux *natively) to the Power Mac. My eyes widened, I realized that it just might be possible.

If we got 75% of the way to my goal -- melding the Mac OS with Unix -- I'd say we're now 90% or 95% of the way there. OS X is not perfect. Nor is it free, either which I'd really love. But... Jobs & co. have brought us that much closer to my goal. I need to congratulate him on this.

I did ask around about this and found the answers not reassuring. Here's the executive summary of my questioning:

Sorenson Media: Nice people. When asked about the codecs used in QuickTime, they said that Apple had exclusive rights. It was 100% up to Apple to keep this IP private, deploy their own version of QuickTime on Linux, or release the binaries to projects like QuickTime4Linux, OpenQuicktime, and others.

Apple Computer: I only found one person that could speak at all about QuickTime ports, and seriously doubt I talked to the best source. With that in mind, her position was that Apple had a thousand things to accomplish and had to make business decisions about priorities. It was my impression that Apple wouldn't feel comfortable releasing the codecs to some Linux hacker, even in binary form. The fact that QuickTime is one of Apple's most famous brands probably doesn't encourage them to be cavalier about their licensing.

I just hope that Apple decides to get off the fence sometime soon. Either develop QuickTime for Linux (which should be considerably easier post-Darwin), or allow the projects that are doing QuickTime for Linux right now to have access to the binary codecs. Linux users will be grateful for whichever solution allows them to watch movie trailers next month, regardless of whether or not it has the look and feel of a real Apple Product.

Until the Sorenson codecs are available on multiple platforms, I'll continue to use standard video formats.

Mostly because it's a glue technology that requires pieces to be inserted in any application that uses it. Applescript is a scripting language that accesses apple events (you can use other languages, applescript just dominates as a practical matter). Applescript as gpl without apple events is just plain useless. Apple events under GPL would turn OS X into Linux by stealth and deception. Nobody's dumb enough to go along with this, or seriously propose it.

With all the hoopla around the new iMac (although I like it very much), I was delighted

to read your report about the "and"ing of Linux and OS X. I think there can be so much overlap and synergy between Apple and the Linux Community if only Jobs were a bit more visionary.. How about porting, elegant applications like, iPhoto, iTunes, AppleWorks, and QT Pro to Linux? Instantly Apple products will be used by thousands of knowledgeable Unix geeks, who might eventually give the mindshare that Apple needs to survive in the long run...

But I was delighted to note that Apple has recruited some top Unix talent into their fold!

iPhoto isn't elegant, I've used it and it doesn't deserve porting yet, it needs to support more cameras, have an option to stop dumping copies of files after every operation you do on them and it needs to let you build a template webpage album to put files on.

Their are heaps of sites which are built from template albums, all they need to do is add the photos then build the page.

iTunes doesn't need to be ported, there are tons of opensource music apps out there.

AppleWorks is worthwhile porting as StarOffice isn't that great or easy to use.

There is QuickTime and then there is QuickTime Pro. QT lets you watch the movies, QTP lets you edit movies. you can adjust the video and auido, create slide shows and prepare video for streaming. Big difference. Lots more tools and stuff you can do. I could not live without it.(well I could, but I don't want to)

If you want to see these apps ported to Linux, I would suggest strongly that hackers help finish the GNUstep project. GNUstep seems to be on the way to being source compatible with Apple's Cocoa APIs. If GNUstep were to become 100% compatible with Apple's Cocoa APIs, then software developers could simply compile their source for 2 different platfomrs. Just last night I downloaded GNUMail for GNUstep and compiled it BOTH under OS X AND GNUstep on Linux.

I think both Gnome and KDE are cool, but I think the real work should be done on the GNUstep desktop environment. With a 100% Cocoa compatible desktop, Linux stands the best chance of having Apple apps ported to it.

For that matter, port GNUstep to Darwin and you have a good chunk of OS X running on Intel architecture.

On the one hand, I think Steve Jobs is focussed on the stuff he tends to obsess about, and where he truly is visionary: on art, design, etc. On the other hand, he's weak at taking the public lead on deep tech stuff. That's what he has Avie Tevanian for.

At a Darwin bird-of-feather (BoF) meeting this evening, I was told by one guy (who knows the parties involved, which I do not) that the deep OS stuff is all Avie's. He went to CMU, he made the decision to go with Mach, etc etc. But his absence at the show seemed conspicuous to me. Then again, one of the BoF guys said that Darwin and OS X doesn't get *really* serious as a geek OS until v10.2. Maybe that's when Avie comes out to play.

I also heard that there will likely be trouble when it comes time to sync up Darwin with modern BSD. It's tight with BSD as of 3 years ago. Question: if Steve & Avie's promise to keep current with BSD is kept, will it make everything being written now into a legacy app? I dunno, but I thought it was an interesting question.

In respect to your last line, one of the guys at the BoF remarked that Apple was scarfing up some top programmers. "He got himself hired for doing stuff like that," another guy said.

Thats a great idea, except I live in a world where I have to pay cash for stuff. I end up having to pay rent, property taxes (on my home, if I own one), bills to various state sanctioned monopolies, and numerous taxes for the carbon-based animal known as a 'car' (car carbon?)

Hey Man, wake up. Linux is cool. It's awesome, it shows what can be done by a bright person with the right tools at the right time and limited fiscal responsibilities.

But ultimately, we live in a market economy where how much you contribute to the economy, for good or bad, is measured in cold cash.

Harsh, yes, reality, yes.

The idea of making 'free' code and then licensing it in a way that empowers nobody is nothing but a grandiose way of those that are wealthy enough to goof off, have fun and everything else to basically stick the finger to the rest of us.

Trending Topics

Webinar: 8 Signs You’re Beyond Cron

Scheduling Crontabs With an Enterprise Scheduler
11am CDT, April 29th

Join Linux Journal and Pat Cameron, Director of Automation Technology at HelpSystems, as they discuss the eight primary advantages of moving beyond cron job scheduling. In this webinar, you’ll learn about integrating cron with an enterprise scheduler.